Excerpt from The Virgin Islands of the United States of America, Historical and Descriptive, Commercial and Industrial, Facts, Figures, and Resources The little group of fifty or more islands in the Carib bean that were generally designated as the Danish West Indies from March 30, 1666, to March 31, 1917, have experienced varying vicissitudes of fortune during the past two hundred and fifty years. Periods of opu lence and plenty and seasons of want and misery have alternately visited them; years of great commercial activity, when the port of St. Thomas became known to the world as The Emporium of the Antilles, were followed by decades when the visiting merchant ships became an inconsiderable and almost a negligible quan tity. The islands, owing to their peculiar geographical position and the unusual advantages offered by their harbours, have been both a bane and a blessing to warring nations; and evil and good reports have Spread regarding the character of the inhabitants and their conditions of life. Columbus included these islands in the Virgin Group which he named after St. Ursula and her virgins. He may have given saintly names to all the fifty, but with the exception of the three large land areas, the islands bear the marks of the buccaneers and other terrors of the Spanish Main, rather than those of the saints, in such titles as Rum Island, Dead Man's Chest, Salt Water Money Rock, Fallen Jerusalem, Flanagan's Pass, and the like. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.